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The Bitter Irony of Cap-and-Trade: Radical Environmentalism Will Kill Off Most Environmentalists

A couple of weeks ago my wife and I went to a farmer’s market that was, I’m ashamed to admit, in the parking lot of a local Whole Foods. As you would expect it was filled with people who arrived in hybrids festooned with bumper stickers promoting “localism” and the fight against global warming. Although the area of South Carolina my wife and I have moved to is within easy driving distance of many small farms (and I live within walking distance of two) it didn’t surprise me that the few stands there offered an extremely limited and expensive selection of produce and some meats that could not serve to feed the population of the greater metro area.

When I lived in New York my wife and I would often go to farmer’s markets and they were much the same. Though they were good for the few small farms in the area, urban farmer’s markets are pretensions that give the illusion of an area’s ability to sustain itself when in fact that area can only sustain its population through large scale industry providing citizens with cheap, readily available goods. The New York tri-state area would experience a famine of biblical proportions if the residents were forced to only buy food from local sources which farmed using practices recommended by environmentalists.The bitter irony is that the environmental movement is largely populated and driven by these same urban residents who have, for generations, been cut off from nature and the simple truths of the food chain. That is about to change with cap-and trade and all the other radical environmentalist legislation that the left in this country is pushing.

Make no mistake. The cap-and-trade (which is the first salvo in a green agenda onslaught about to be unleashed on Americans) will adversely affect the industries urban environmentalist rely on to live. All those hippies in Berkeley, all those hipsters in NYC and every Che T-shirt wearing house frau who haunts the Whole Foods produce section while sipping their Starbucks are completely unable to survive without an intricate network of businesses whose sole purpose is to ensure that people who have no idea how to produce food themselves don’t starve to death.

Large scale industrial farms burn millions of gallons of fuel to grow vegetables for people who don’t realize it’s unnatural for most of the country to even have access to fresh vegetables in the winter. Billions more gallons of fuel are burned by trucking companies who bring food into the cities where residents are blissfully unaware of the fact that should these trucks stop running grocery stores would be empty within 3-5 days. Stores spend millions of dollars a year on refrigeration to unnaturally extend the life of food, and the carbon footprint of the factories that process the canned, preserved and pre-packaged foods city dwellers rely on must surely make those urban environmentalists cringe.

Cap-and-trade is just the first attack on that system, which has functioned so smoothly and flawlessly that these same people attacking it have no idea how dependent they are on it to live. American vegan and vegetarian diets are only possible because of industrialized agriculture, especially in places like the northeast where harsh winters ensured for millenia that people needed to hunt for meat to survive. Healthy veganism and vegetarianism are only possible through the vitamin and supplement industry. Few environmentalists in fact are promoting any real sustainable lifestyle, but are instead promoting a moral philosophy based largely on secularized New Age clap trap.

It seems to have escaped our urbane friends in the Green movement that putting legislation in place that will effectively eliminate most of the activities that make megalopolis living feasible by a certain point in time will effectively eliminate not only those areas we would refer to as megalopolises (and in fact any large metro area) but will also eliminate those who live within them. With ethanol mandates already starving out poor people in third world countries, the Greens are now pushing to make farming yield even less by making it less efficient. They are destroying the ability of farmers to transport their goods to city dwellers without having a working alternative to the trucks they so despise. They are hampering the ability of grocery stores to make a profit by making their expenses go up, and those stores will attempt to recoup those losses by raising prices.

There are rosy scenarios being floated around on the right where businesses pick up and leave America causing massive unemployment and a spike in prices. These scenarios are rosy because they presume that we will still have food on the shelves, albeit more expensive than ever. But the Green agenda which is pushing cap-and-trade, just as it pushed the disastrous ethanol mandates, is setting up a system where less people will produce less food for more people. Small farms, already shrinking at a rate that makes food shortages inevitable, will disappear even faster. Trucking companies will make less runs into the cities. Less food and livestock will be available as farmers cash in on government sponsored demand for bio-fuels and then we will see the end result of the Green agenda: food shortages.

The average “Green” is used to a life of leisure. He or she has not competed for resources, has not relied on a day’s catch to feed his or her family. They have not known hunger or want. They will be thrust into a world where people fight over the last loaf of bread.They will suddenly, ironically, come face to face with real nature as they struggle to survive in a world where their own agenda has made it impossible to live in a New York, where hungry masses fight over the limited resources that occur naturally. The fewer deliveries of food from all across the country, and the world, will literally translate into starvation and collapse for the 9 million or so people in New York City.

I grew up in the 70s when my family kept large gardens, and fished for vacations. We kept the fish we caught in a deep freezer, we stored our tomatoes and cucumbers to eat. We stretched every dollar until it screamed, and pinched pennies so hard we left dents. I am not a great fisherman and the tomatillos I grew this year leave much to be desired, but my wife and I are prepared (or preparing really) to rely less on grocery stores. We will never live within a large city again and practice walking the 3 miles to the nearest large grocery chain for the inevitable time when gas becomes so expensive that we only drive in emergencies.We know what it is like to live simply, and perhaps violently, and though we don’t like it can get by when that time comes.

But what of those Birkenstock clad women in their paisley summer dresses shrewfully wagging their fingers at the world while their husbands pay for their “fair trade” papayas on their American Express? When food riots in New York inevitably move into their expensive suburbs as the poor, priced into starvation by the Green agenda, explode into violence how will they survive? When shelves are empty what will they eat? When the park system is emptied of its wild edibles (and Van Cortlandt park is the best place to forage for wild greens by the way) what then the family of four who never realized they would need to find a way to feed themselves that didn’t include a cashier?

The Green agenda seeks to push America into a more agrarian 18th century style country. They seek a 21st century world where 20th century technology is banished and cities take on the characteristics of Walnut Grove. But these are no Ingalls family, able or willing to live a life of self-sufficiency. These are people completely reliant on post-industrial society, hooked to the slow and steady intravenous drip of industrialized food production and oil based delivery systems. In their stupor they seek to tear that line out of their own arm, even though it will likely kill them.